Hello, everyone, and welcome to Talk Nerdy.

Today is Monday, July 21st, 2025, and I'm the host of the show, Dr. Kara Santa Maria. This week's episode marks number

560. And as I always say at the top of the show, I couldn't make this podcast without

the support of listeners just like you. I will never charge for Talk Nerdy. If you cannot

afford to pay for the show, I do not expect

you to. I want this content to be free for everybody. So the way that we keep this model going

now that ad sales are really, really depressed is through Patreon, just like NPR, just like PBS.

I rely heavily on the support of listeners, just like you. So if you're interested

in pledging your support on an episodic basis, all you've got to do is visit patreon.com

slash talk nerdy to learn more. This week's top patrons include Anu Badovaj, Chuck Blell, Daniel

Lang, David J.E. Smith, Joseph Lomore, Mary Miva, Brian Holden,

David Compton, Gabrielle F. Harmeo, Joe Wilkinson, Pasquale Jalati, and Ulrika Hagman. Thank you all so much

from the bottom of my heart. All right, let's dive into this week's episode. So I had the

opportunity today to chat with Dr. Mary Ellen MacDonald. She's a cognitive scientist with a focus

on psycholinguistics and an emerit professor of psychology and language sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

And she's written a book for all of us. It's a trade book for public consumption. It's very

exciting. It's called More Than Words, How Talking Sharps the Mind and Shapes Our World.

So without any further ado, here she is, Dr. Mary Ellen McDonald.

Well, Mary Ellen, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks. It's great to be here.

So we're going to be talking about your newest book. It's called More Than Words,

how talking sharpens the mind andes Our World. And I'm always

really interested in language as the human species, as an evolutionary concept, but also as a

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